USA for Today

Spoiled: Hillary Leaves US, Trashes ‘Backward’ States

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to take a page from her 2016 campaign “deplorables” playbook over the weekend, saying those states that supported her candidacy are “optimistic, dynamic” and “moving forward,” while those that didn’t found Donald Trump’s “backwards”-looking themes appealing.

“If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won,” Clinton said Saturday at the India Today Conclave 2018 in Mumbai. “I win the coast, I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota, places like that.”

“But what the map doesn’t show you, is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product,” she continued, according to The Hill. “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.”

In a line somewhat reminiscent of her “deplorables” comment, the former Democrat presidential nominee stated Trump’s message centered around racism and misogyny.

“You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs,” Clinton said. “You don’t want, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I’m going solve it.”

Running contrary to Clinton’s depiction of Trump, two very prominent people in his administration — U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah — are children of immigrants from India.

At a fundraiser in New York City in September 2016, Clinton said, “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

She added: “And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.”

These people, Clinton said, are “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

The other half of Trump supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”